Americans Abandon Driving For Mere Steering

October 10, 1996|By Stephen Chapman.

Mechanization has generally been a blessing to mankind, relieving us of assorted miserable tasks, from pulling plows and beating laundry on rocks to copying documents by hand and adding up endless columns of numbers with pencil and paper. But sometimes, mechanization needs a good whack upside the head.

It now stands to extinguish an activity that neither punishes the body nor numbs the mind. Like left-wing radicals promising to liberate us from forms of oppression we hadn't even noticed, automakers are striving to lift from us the heavy yoke of . . . the manual transmission. The stick shift is rapidly going the way of the crank starter and the rumble seat.

That's the report in Newsweek magazine, which says that eight out of nine cars sold in America today come with an automatic transmission. It's safe to assume this means that most people not only do not drive stick shifts but cannot drive stick shifts, that skill having become as useless in the modern world as the ability to tan animal hides.

Some upscale makes, including Lexus, Mercedes and Volvo, don't bother offering manual transmissions anymore. Even Europeans, who resisted the trend for years, are now succumbing to sloth.

This development is probably just one more step toward that happy day when we can get behind the wheel, start the car--or will it start itself?--and then take a nap while it handles the chore of negotiating the journey to our destination. People using automatic transmissions may think they are driving. Actually, all they are doing is steering.

There are times when that is enough. If you are a parent doomed to spend many hours transporting the family in a minivan, you are better off without a stick shift, since you will need to keep one hand free to separate squabbling children, restrain boisterous dogs and dislodge small toys lodged under the brake pedal. Piloting a family room on wheels, regardless of the transmission mode, is unlikely to ever be any more exciting than riding an escalator, unless you count the excitement of entering a freeway ramp while trying to get your 5-year-old's "Pickle Puss" cassette to play.

Automatics also come in handy at those moments of crisis known as teenagers' driving lessons. Teaching a frisky and scatter-brained adolescent how to handle a 2-ton mass of machinery with enticing capacities for speed and sin is not a relaxing enterprise under the best of circumstances. Throw in the intricacies of manipulating a clutch pedal and getting from second to third without the grinding sound of metal on metal, and it verges on clinical masochism.

But parents should endure it anyway. If we take the view that our kids should never have to learn anything that is slightly difficult, it's no wonder that their performance against foreigners in standardized tests looks like the score of the Croatia's game against the Dream Team.

In most circumstances, after all, a manual transmission is vastly preferable to an automatic. Shifting gears is that rare treat--a marriage of the functional and the enjoyable. Done correctly, by which I mean with ordinary competence, it offers the sort of satisfaction people seek from hitting a golf ball or playing a sonata, with the added virtue of transporting you from one place to another.

The point of doing away with this task is hard to see. It doesn't make the trip shorter; nor does it spare us some beastly toil. And, unlike many technological innovations, it doesn't save money. An automatic transmission costs more when you buy a car and more when you drive it.

I stand second to no one in my admiration of the free market, but it must be given much of the guilt for the disappearance of stick shifts. By scrapping price controls on gasoline and crude oil, Ronald Reagan unleashed competitive forces that have steadily reduced the cost of driving. No longer faced with high pump prices, motorists have been deprived of a beneficent incentive to choose fuel-efficient manual transmissions over gas-guzzling automatics.

Some people would have insisted on automatics anyway, feeling that shifting gears and pushing clutch pedals is just way too much work. This is like saying a leisurely walk in the country on a crisp fall day is too much work. Yes, it involves a bit of effort, but the effort itself is part of the enjoyment, and it is repaid many times over.

An entire generation of kids is growing up unable to drive a car with a manual transmission and, what is worse, regarding a stick shift with fear. They don't know what they're missing. The right attitude is the one captured in the ad for the stick-equipped BMW, which has the gearshift knob imprinted not with gear numbers but a single, appropriate word: "Yeeha!"